The climax of The Nice and the Good is one of the most wearingly tense reading experiences available, holding up even to re-reading--and it's a great example of how this novelist of intellect and ideas also knew how to write action; the sheer physicality of some of her climactic scenes is stunning.

The Guardian described Martha Wainwright as "wearingly needy, endlessly self-examining", which gives me a damn good reason not to have anything to do with her, but just look at that picture, would you?

The disillusionment with memory that is everywhere in The Sea, though nowhere polemical or wearingly insistent, is a testament to the fact that – for those for whom the gods have departed – memory has become redemptive.